Archives For January 2014

We are organizing an OpenElections hackathon on the Sunday of NICAR, from 10am til 6pm in the Chesapeake room.

If you are here at NICAR, and would like to join us after all the other activities, we would love to have you. We are looking for coders as well as anyone interested in helping out, and spending the day with our team. Here’s how you can be involved:

Track One – Build Our Interface
Help us build the first draft of a public-facing map-based interface for OpenElections. The map will show the status of the project metadata and data acquisition, as well as scraper development. In the finished version, the interface will also give users access to results data.

Track Two – Election Results Data Scraper Development
Help us extend our core scraper architecture to create a series of custom scrapers that account for the idiosyncrasies in how each state structures data, stores it, and makes it available.

**Our docs for this process are now up on our site. Look here to see what would be involved with joining in**

Track Three – Documentation and Use Cases
Help us flesh out the guides that articulate all of the processes volunteers need to know to work with us, as well as the documentation that other developers will need in order to build on our work. Also, or alternately, come by and give us your use cases! We will be collecting descriptions of how all kinds of journalists use elections data now, and how you would like OpenElections to work for you.

Your time and expertise would be most appreciated either all or part of the day.